They are Turcoman traders going to Baku and Tiflis with bales of the
famous kibitka hangings and carpets. Tchislikar is the port whence a few
years ago the Russian expedition set out on their campaign against the
Tekke Turcomans. Three hundred miles inland is the famous fortress of
Geoke Tepe, where disaster overtook the Russians, and where, in a
subsequent campaign, occurred that massacre of women and children which
caused the Western world to wonder anew at the barbarism of the Russian
soldiery.
Still steaming north, our little craft ploughs her way toward
Krasnovodsk, an important military station on the eastern coast.
At night the surface of the sea becomes smooth and glassy, the sun sets,
rotund and red, in a haze suggestive of Indian summer in the West. The
cabins are small and stuffy, so I sleep up on the hurricane-deck,
wrapping a Persian sheepskin overcoat about me. An awning covers this
deck completely, but this does not prevent everything beneath getting
drenched with dew. Never did I see such a fall of dew. It streams off the
big awning like a shower of rain, and soaks through it and drips, drips
on to my recumbent form and everything on the hurricane-deck.
Early in the morning we moor our ship to the dock at Krasnovodsk, and
load and unload merchandise till noon.
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